WLAN systems are very popular in home, office, and business environments. Not only do conventional laptops and desktop systems rely on WLAN services to connect with remote resources but mobile phones, personal digital assistants, televisions, and home entertainment systems increasingly take advantage of the network as well. These demands impose requirements not only for additional bandwidth but also additional range.
Unfortunately, technical limitations upon the 2.4 and 5 GHz ranges typically employed by WLAN systems limit the ability of these systems to address many users' growing needs. Accordingly, there exists a need for systems and methods to extend the range of these systems while still offering quality communication links that don't require considerable adjustments to be compatible with existing user devices.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Further, the drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be expanded or reduced to help improve the understanding of the embodiments. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.